Angelina Jolie didn’t use ‘money game’ to audition Cambodian orphans for film

Angelina Jolie is ‘upset’ over an article suggesting she teased Cambodian orphans with a money-based game to find the lead for her new film, insisting her actions were misrepresented.

In a cover interview with Vanity Fair magazine, Angelina revealed how she had chosen untrained actress Sareum Srey Moch to play the child version of her Cambodian friend, Loung Ung, the main character in her latest film project First They Killed My Father.

According to editors at the magazine, the Salt star described how she played a game with the impoverished Cambodian youngsters, placing money on a table, so that the child took the cash then “catching” them taking the money and forcing them to give it back.

However, Angelina is now explaining the “game” was a “pretend exercise in an improvisation” and the children were surrounded by their caretakers during the making of the movie.

“Every measure was taken to ensure the safety, comfort and well-being of the children on the film starting from the auditions through production to the present,” a statement to the Huffington Post reads. “Parents, guardians, partner NGOs whose job it is to care for children, and medical doctors were always on hand everyday, to ensure everyone had all they needed. And above all to make sure that no one was in any way hurt by participating in the recreation of such a painful part of their country’s history.

“I am upset that a pretend exercise in an improvisation, from an actual scene in the film, has been written about as if it was a real scenario,” the statement adds. “The suggestion that real money was taken from a child during an audition is false and upsetting. I would be outraged myself if this had happened. The point of this film is to bring attention to the horrors children face in war, and to help fight to protect them.”

The film documents Loung’s life from the age of five to nine under Cambodia’s brutal Khmer Rouge communist regime. Between 1975 and 1979 an estimated 1.5 to 3 million Cambodians died at the hands of the regime and its leader Pol Pot.